**Bitcoin’s Flux Prompts Inferences**
The cryptocurrency realm concludes yet another week with remarkable events witnessed across the broader crypto market. Among these events, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and meme coins appear to be standing out particularly, garnering substantial investor attention.
**Bitcoin’s Flux Prompts Inferences**
Over the past week, Bitcoin has traded with quite a lot of volatility, with its price showcasing substantial dips and jumps in hand. This piqued the global crypto market’s attention, as the token showcased a set of mixed market sentiments despite the highly optimistic BTC halving looming.
Standard Chartered, a consumer banking protocol, anticipated BTC to hit $150K this year, aligning with the optimism sparked by the upcoming halving. Whereas, many industry prominencies predicted a further slump for Bitcoin, attributing it to a plethora of reasons including, BTC options that are set to expire, FUD-triggered whale selloffs, crypto market liquidations, market corrections, etc.
Intriguingly, Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy acquired more Bitcoin this week, totaling its BTC holdings to more than that of the US govt. or China, evaluating as 1% of BTC’s max supply. On the other hand, the recently emerging BTC ETFs gained additional traction as Grayscale announced that it would be slashing its GBTC BTC ETF fees shortly.
**Ethereum Encounters Setback**
Ethereum, the world’s second-most popular cryptocurrency, countered a notable setback this week as its price showcased a significant downturn. Although banking institutions like Standard Chartered remained bullish on ETH’s price action ahead, the broader crypto market painted a bearish outlook for ETH this week.
A stockpile of reasons, including the surge in ETH exchange inflows, crypto market liquidation, the derivatives market’s loss of investor confidence, and others, pulled ETH down to the $3.3K mark. In the interim, traders continued to offload colossal amounts of ETH tokens amid this recently witnessed correction, stirring a whirlpool of bearishness on Ethereum this week.
**Meme Coins Fuel Speculation**
Meanwhile, the meme coin universe sparkled with phenomenal gains again, although the meme coin season seems to be waning away. Some of the top meme coins that echoed a frenzy this week are-
**Shiba Inu**
The self-proclaimed Dogecoin killer illustrated a storm of breakthroughs this week, with its ecosystem embarking upon strategic collaborations, developments, and token launches. Although even Shiba Inu witnessed price corrections, aligning with the broader correctory trend within the market, the token’s community’s continued SHIB burning and recent advancements spotlighted in ‘The Shib’ added a tint of market optimism to the meme coin.
**Slerf**
Similarly, this week, Slerf, a Solana-based meme coin, curated a torrent of speculative buzz. With extended support from exchanges such as HTX, Jupiter, and Beeple, the meme token noted phenomenal gains.
However, Slerf investors also incurred a $10 million loss this week, resulting from a major accident in the presale phases. The project developer accidentally burned LP tokens and the entire reserve of the 500 million SLERF tokens for the airdrop, causing a bustle among crypto market enthusiasts. Nonetheless, the project offered NFTs to presale investors to mitigate the losses caused by the recent $10 million catastrophe.
